Creating the Ultimate MMO.

[Deleted]

Ok. I am a 6 year old veteran of WoW and have also been playing GW2 and SWTOR since release. Each individual game has good points and bad points. Why don't developers realize this and make an ultimate MMO

Features of the Ultimate MMO.

- WoW's Lore/Story (Lets be honest, the Warcraft lore is 10x better than that of Star Wars or Guild Wars)
- WoW's combat system (Feels refined and smooth and has had 6 years for the developers to perfect it)
- WoW's PvE endgame (No other MMO in existence comes close to WoW's PvE end game)
- SWTOR's Questing Dialogue (The cutscenes where you can choose a response)
- SWTOR's Crafting System
- GW2's leveling system (The Personal Story and Dynamic events and heart quests)
- GW2's graphics and animations (The world and NPC/Character details are great, spell effects are good and the animations of the character are amazing)
- GW2's World v World PvP system (This is by far the best PvP experience I have had in any game to date)
- GW2's 5v5 Arena PvP
- WoW's Battleground PvP's
- GW2's Auction House/Black Market screen.
- WoW's Achievement System.
- GW2's Character Creation.

I love all 3 of these games but I have to admit, WoW is the best by a long way purely because all of the features it has got (PvP, PvE, Questiong) are good, some of them not as good as other but it doesn't have a stand out bad feature. It does some things amazingly well like raids etc and the things it doesn't do as well at (PvP, questing) still wouldn't be classed as terrible.

Guild Wars 2 has nailed Questing, Character Creation, PvP and graphics on the head. I would go as far as to say that GW2 has the best PvP and Questing (1-80 content) of all time however they can't touch WoW as far as PvE, Combat, Lore goes.

My dream is for BioWare, ArenaNet and Blizzard to team up for WoW 2. Let Arenanet create the base game and handle the World Creation, Graphics, leveling content, PvP (World v World or something similar and 5v5 arenas) and Character Creation. Let Blizzard come in and implement a combat system, PvE content, Battlegrounds abd the endgame in general then hand it over to ArenaNet so they can add voice over dialogue and a crafting system then hand the game back to Blizzard to take care of the Lore and the future endgame patches.

It pisses me off that I need to switch to GW2 for some solid PvP action then if I want to PvE or raid I need to log into WoW. I don't play SWTOR anymore because that game sucked at both PvP and PvE, the only things they did right was the cut scene questing and the crafting system.

Please for the love of god make a new MMO and don't try to copy WoW like Rift and Aion did. Take the best features from all 3 of these games and make a (One MMO to rule them all)

Oh and use the Talent system from GW2 and the Music/Soundtrack team from Blizzard who do an awesome job year after year with zone music.

[Deleted]

We need a good WH40k MMO.

[Deleted]

If they add in the Runescape Distraction and Diversion, it would be a hero game!

[Golden Yak]

We need a good WH40k MMO.

They're making one oh wait, no they aren't.

[Thage]

They're making one oh wait, no they aren't.

Studios are likely leery of the Warhammer IP after Mythic's handling of WAR (rushed release and other content, an unreliable to say the absolute least billing vendor, and poor customer service) caused it to crash splendidly.

[Aerai]

Studios are likely leery of the Warhammer IP after Mythic's handling of WAR (rushed release and other content, an unreliable to say the absolute least billing vendor, and poor customer service) caused it to crash splendidly.

Rather sad considering Relic's track record with the Dawn of War franchise. Even that Space Marine 3rd Person Shooter was pretty fun. Oh well, there's always the actual tabletop version I suppose :P

[nitewarlord]

project titan anyone???

[Deleted]

Just give me my Stargate MMO and il be happy.

[Thage]

Rather sad considering Relic's track record with the Dawn of War franchise. Even that Space Marine 3rd Person Shooter was pretty fun. Oh well, there's always the actual tabletop version I suppose :P

Yeah. The debacle that broke WAR and Mythic was the second big billing disaster they had. Their billing vendor was trying out new code, and some of the code was bad, causing subscribers to be charged tens of times--some players reported charges in the thousands of dollars, and one thread was full of a good 80 pages of people reporting that they had to swallow their pride and beg for food/toiletries/other survival needs from their neighbors because they were hundreds or thousands of dollars in the hole. Mythic posters were just kind of... blase about the entire thing, promising to refund all the extraneous billing withdrawals--except the one for that month of play time.

WAR never really recovered after that, sadly.

[kamikaze148]

I clicked on this thread ready to shoot the OP down, but...you...actually raise really good points, and generally i agree with every single one of them!

I cant fault any of your points, except maybe your appraisal of WoW's achievement system. it really wasnt implemented or designed well, and the consequences of having to provide an achievement that to an extent, player dont "need" to be invited to a raid etc.

To me any rate achievements are a reinforcement for the elitism that is rife in WoW compared to other games, heres hoping account wide achievements help to eliminate the problem, especially for alt runs.

But i tend to agree, each game has its amazing points, and each game has its terrible points. To me the perfect game would be to slap WoW's end game and combat dynamics/system to GW2's graphics and levelling/questing.

[Golden Yak]

Studios are likely leery of the Warhammer IP after Mythic's handling of WAR (rushed release and other content, an unreliable to say the absolute least billing vendor, and poor customer service) caused it to crash splendidly.

Possibly, but I was referring to the WH40K MMO they were making for several years, which then became a single player game, which then became non-existent and no one talks about it anymore.

[Marthenil]

I agree to most of your points except for one: WoW's lore is interesting yeah, but extremely cliche (maybe not the best choice of word but i'll go along with it for the moment).
It really seems like they mixed every fantasy world out there (rather beautifully I will admit) and the result is WoW's lore.
Lore-wise I really want to see an mmo in Elric of Melnibone's World or in The Witcher's one.
EDIT:
Combat wise, GW2's approach I like most from the existing. WoW's seems too slow nowadays (Been playing the game since launch until Christmass 2011 and then experimented with MMO's here and there). One nice addition would be the SWTOR thing of spells doing different things in PvE and PvP so as to balance the game.

PvE-wise I personally think traditional raiding is kinda dying. I think we need to find better and more dynamic ways of making people work together with a common goal (GW2 is close but not so close at the same time).

PvP should be as close to balanced as possible (so as to qualify as an e-sport). No arenas but things like 5v5 objective based matches (lending attributes from moba games perhaps? ) should be the way competitive pvp is handled . Traditional bg's should exist too.

Disclaimer: The above is purely and 100% my opinion and should not be accepted as a fact

[Thage]

Possibly, but I was referring to the WH40K MMO they were making for several years, which then became a single player game, which then became non-existent and no one talks about it anymore.

Oh, that one. Again, may have been in reaction to WAR, but that's a question for the ages I guess.

[Wafflemonster]

They're making one oh wait, no they aren't.

I'm sorry but LOLOLOLOLOL I'm LOLING SO HARD. You win everything ever.

[dPwnShop]

I wish I could fast forward 5 years from now for a day and scan the internet, just to get an idea of what we have in store for us. Gaming as a whole is getting better every year imo. Sometimes it feels like we get stuck in a rut for awhile but developers see what people enjoy and what's successful. I agree with most of your post, I didn't care for the amount of cut scenes in SWTOR but that's just a personal preference and I know that was the highlight of the game for the majority of people.

Another thing I've noticed after playing GW2 is how much I enjoy the "holy trinity". I just think it makes the flow of dungeons/pve go more smoothly. One way I can see the tank/healer shortage issues that come along with it is a system where every class/profession can preform at least one of those roles. While I do enjoy the way gw2 keeps you on your toes, I think the only thing needed in the holy trinity setting would insure that the "support" of a dps is needed just as much as tank/healers. This to keep everyone in the group accountable for a successful/unsuccessful run.

I started with UO and instantly fell in love with MMO's. There is something about being able to take a break from the real world but still socialize and have fun with people that just got me hooked. In short, I can't wait for the future of mmo's... I might never have the same feeling of "awe" as I did when first starting UO, but that won't keep me from searching for it. Our Ultimate MMO will come, when is the only question.

[Voidgazer]

I made a similar thread some time ago, but it wasn't really popular. Oh well, I'll just lay out some of my basic ideas for the ultimate MMO then.

Warning: Oops, sorry, I tried to make my post more structured and logical, but still got emotional and carried away, and slid into personal WoW rant. But anyway, everything I said applies to all MMOs out there. WoW is so successful for a reason, since while it is not the ultimate MMO, but still probably the closest (or was such at some point). English isn't my first language so there are expected to be mistakes here and there in my post. Which got really long... oh boy, no wonder my previous thread wasn't popular, reading isn't quite the favorite pastime of today's youth. But I'm gonna post it anyway, because I'd feel bad for not sharing my thoughts with you.

-First and foremosts - we need to minimize usage of instancing in the game, unless it's absoultely unavoidable. MMO loses its most unique trait - persistent world - when it's simply not populated. The ultimate MMO should have strong player interaction, in all aspects of the game, which will support building solid communities on every realm. This obviously disallows any kind of cross-realm gameplay, like the abominable dungeon finder or cross-realm battlegrounds.

-Speaking of battlegrounds and PvP in general. Take for example battlegrounds in WoW, lore-wise those are supposed to be places where the two factions battle for resources to supply their own troops, as well as manufacturing and civilians at home. In reality battlegrounds are just instances for honor farming, which have zero effect on the game world (with exception of WG and TB). This is where things are really wrong in WoW - PvP and PvE aspects of the game have been almost completely isolated from each other. The whole purpose of PvP in WoW is to farm PvP currency to buy specialized PvP gear... to farm more PvP currency. Yeah, yeah I know, constant progress in MMOs, carrot on the stick and all that. Can't argue with that you always need to get reward in some form for doing things in an MMO. Still, I am shocked that a lot of people consider the Arena, of all things, to be the pinnacle of PvP in WoW. It's just like a game withing a game, small groups of random people battling each other for nothing in a sterile environment, compeltely isolated from the rest of the virtual world.

-My idea of PvP done right - is that you should be always battling for something what would make large groups of people benefit from, like your faction, your guild, your race etc. PvP objectives should always matter even for people who are not directly involved in it, as well as the other way around - victory over undead lords and demonic generals should boost morale (apply a zone/faction/guild buff) of your allies.

-I am sorry, I criticize WoW for separating PvP and PvE, but still use these two terms like if they were two sides of the same coin. Actually I wanted to say there should be little to no differences between PvP and PvE combat. Combat mechanics design should regard combat with a mob more like a combat with another PC. This applies to humanoid enemies at least. In WoW item and character stats grew so bloated because of some irrational decisions in dungeons and raids design. Huge monsters started to have too much life and hit too hard, compared to the players. It's really simple and I wonder how Blizzard haven't realized this before, but for a monster to be dangerous or for a fight to feel epic, it shouldn't be so overtuned. This stat growth was the sole reason why we have resilience now, which in its turn aggravates the PvE/PvP separation. Resilience and PvP gear is an unnatural barrier that prevents people from participating in PvP (or lack of secondary stats which place was taken by resilience, prevents PvPers from fully engaging in PvE). Damage, healing and all stats should be normalized between PvP and PvE.

-When I was talking about battlegrounds and PvP objectives I mentioned factional warfare, but I personally don't think it's the best model out there. Though it works I'd really like to see much more virable politics in an MMO. You know how you get a reputation with your own guild now in WoW? Well, I was thinking about something like that, but for every guild on the server, with abilities to make alliances or wars. Ideally, there should also be a variety of NPC factions, each not only with their own rep (like for example Bloodsail Beccaneers), but also with their own quests, factional vendors, other NPC (or even player guilds) reputation dependancies.

-Okay, I said a lot of negative things about the current state of WoW, so lets also mention some things I actually like about it (doesn't mean they can't be improved though). First, I want to mention WoW crafting and trade. Auction house is a really great thing, which allows open market trading and allows quick and easy way for customers to browse through trade goods and search for the items they need, set price ranges etc. Old school korean MMOs like RO and LA2 hadn't a powerful tool likes in the time I played them (or maybe I was just dumb and couldn't find it), and city squares were littered with trading bots spamming their messages, not to mention speech bubbles obscured vision like a thick smog.

-Another example from a bygone era - crafting classes or races. Some people here might not have witnessed this, but you imagine, that back then crafting was sometimes exclusive to a couple of classes or a race. So every player usually had to have at least one of those, besides the main character, simply to make money for living, or not to be ripped off by the people maining trader characters. Not to mention these crafters were practically useless in combat. I find trainable crafting professions in WoW to be pretty good, and I hope we will never see crafting classes ever again.

-Item rarity system. I must say WoW loot system (which is actually just a development of Diablo loot) has earned its place in gaming history, and is already adopted and widely used by many other games.

-Although I listed the three previous elements of an MMO as well implemented in WoW, they still have their own issues, which I'll now try to point out. First of all, my main character in WoW is an enchanter, so this is really obvious to me, but the game is oversaturated with the so-called welfare epics or "purples". It has got to the point when Crystals (which you get from disenchanting a purple item) are more common than Shards (the blue ones). I absolutely can't see why when new dungeons come with the new raid tiers, they should drop epic quality items. Just make them higher level blues with the more stats and this simple action will prevent new patches messing with economy. Not to mention that when literally everyone wears all purples it's totally ruins the very sense of these items being somehow "epic". I see no harm in final dungeon bosses dropping an occasional rare epic item or two though.

-Additional note on rarity, considering legendary items. I hate to see how they become new epics. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of those on every realm (I'm talking about the latest staff and daggers). Most top guilds already list having a legendary weapon as a mandatory condition for applying. And it seems that in MoP situation is only getting worse with the new classless legendaries. Legendary weapons should not be obtainable through simple farm of the current tier raids, because everyone does taht, so everyone can get a personal legendary sooner or later. The key to making a legendary item really stand out is make it really rare. 1-3% chance of it being dropped by the boss is good enough. Well, not the whole legendary I mean, like the Glaives or Thori'dal, since it'd be too simple, but an item that starts the legendary quest chain. During which you'd have to perorm some actions during raid encoutners (Shadowmourn), defeat a special quest raid boss (Thunderfury, Tarecgosa) and do a little bit of crafting/material gathering (Thunderfury, Sulfuras). This should be less tedious than simply farming fragments/shards/embers, but still provide challenge in form of special quest requirements/bosses and actually make legendaries rare.

-Now, considering crafting and trading, I would really like to see crafting profession synergy brought back. Right now almost all the high level crafting goods only require one profession to be made. What I'm trying to say here, is that I'd like to see more engineering items requiring crafting materials made by blacksmiths, more leatherworking items requiring some clothing materials, mining requiring alchemical ingridients and vice versa. Especially in high level or epic quality crafting. This would encourage more player interaction and trading, as well as not stacking the professions you personally benefit from the most, since your guildmates (as well as yourself) would require crafting materials from different professions, or would be forced to spend the guild budget on buying those from the third parties.

-One more compliment to WoW - the game has the most complicated, challenging and interesting end-game PvE content so far (though its quality has been dropping for quite some time already). Still I'm not quite pleased with the current state of raiding in WoW, and I guess I wouldn't be alone if I say that I want to see more raids like Ulduar. My main complaint about the current raids is that the new Heroic system is just not a really good one. The top guilds (I do not belong to one of those) are forced to go through a week of normal mode (which is widely considered to be easy mode) before getting to the actual boss fights. And even after you've farmed the normal mode gear you "become a hero" by flipping a switch in the game UI. Honestly I just don't find it exciting. At all. Ulduar model allowed players to manually activate the hard modes (compared to the new heroic mode) by performing certain actions during the actual boss encounters. Your "heroism" was only limited by your own skill and desire for adidtional challenge. I simply fail to understand why has Blizzard dropped this "Ulduar model" in favor of the new one.

-So, despite all the negatives, WoW still has pretty good end-game content, but on the other hand leveling content got completely neglected recently. Every next expansion lowers xp requiremetns for level advancement and encourages players to rush to the level cap "where the real game begins", effectively skipping the levleing content. Seriously, this might be just me, but I actually like leveling, and make a new char from time to time, just for that sole reason, without any plans of developing it into a full-fledged alt character. I know many people do this too. But that might get repetitive if the game doesn't provide enough content, or too easy if you get reduced leveling requirements/xp booster items etc. Leveling is also a part of the game which should be made as enjoyable and varied as the end-game content, and not be reduced to just an obstacle on the way to the level cap.

-This brings us to another very important aspect of the game - exploration. I think everyone remembers "that feeling" when they sat before their PCs and logged into WoW for the first time. The feeling of adventure. We, grizzled veterans of the MMO front, probably won't ever experience it again, but I also doubt that the new players these days feel the same way we did. Games grow more mechanized and too gameplay-focused (which is indisputably important too), they become soulless. Dungeon layouts become more simplified and look synthetic and unnatural, utilitty and simply fun spells get abolished, hidden locations and items are all recorded in online databases. Every aspect of your gameplay is calculated and you stray from the trodden path, you're "playing the game wrong", which you'll be immidiately told by the nearest teenage player. We really need to make MMOs feel fun and not like a second job, without hurting the gameplay.

[Toxigen]

Step 1 - grab most aspects of Asheron's Call (no instances, 100% random loot, full character customization, "dodge-able" projectiles including war magic, harsher penalties for death including corpse looting in PVP, housing, patron-vassal xp passup system, original / constantly-changing storyline with developer-driven world events on a monthly basis, etc etc)

Step 2 - include WoW-like high end raiding

Step 3 - put it all in a new graphics engine

Step 4 - profit

[Stir]

OP: I don't know; you do have a point, but I don't know if it'd be a good idea to have just one thing for everyone.

Voidgazer: That's a lengthy post, but I can be very brief in why it wasn't very popular:
You're looking for a different game.

You want to force people to work together, force people to engage in the community in the way you want them to, force PvE players who generally don't even enjoy (or are even annoyed by) PvP to do PvP anyway (they'll get attacked regardless in your perfect MMO), while forcing PvP players who feel that PvE is tedious and non-responsive to grind away in PvE anyway (or else they won't be able to compete in PvP).

The way WoW is now, you can CHOOSE to do any of those things. You can choose to play PvE, PvP or even both. You can choose to grind, you can choose to socialize, you can choose to be involved in a community (or even start one), and you can choose to play pretty much your own game. Nobody is forcing any kind of playstyle on anyone, and to be honest, the game is better for it.
If they would implement the kind of playstyle tyranny that you suggest, they would quickly lose much of their subscribers.

Besides that, you do spend some time explaining what you want, and that's fine... But you don't explain how you would like to see it implemented. A few of your assumptions involve an error in judgement (balancing PvE vs. PvP; yes, you do need a different damage dynamic, because if you didn't, PvE encounters would be far too easy as well as far too short. Either that, or PvP would inevitably become 'people slowly chipping away at one another,' which would completely change the dynamics of healing (basically: A healing ability would only heal *chip* amount of damage, which is nigh negligible on a health bar; inflation would render the emotional rewards of healing moot, turning healers bots). The systematic balance is pretty hard to nail down, but in the end, you simply cannot combine the two (and keep either activity challenging and enjoyable).

As for the whole 'open world; no instances'-thing: That's not really challenging, is it? You could just zerg-farm everything with your guild... Keep people posted on lookout for respawns and zerg again. You'd get groups of people who would own everything, and other groups who simply wouldn't get the window of opportunity they need in order to get things done. So you're achieving two things, here: Player opportunity monopoly over the game, and a lack of challenging content (which you propose to be made up for by the constant threat of PvP; certainly you'd get groups raiding other groups for the rights of farming areas, but if 50% of the playerbase is strong enough to compete with that (and that is a very royal assumption; the top-competing players are generally less than 10%), the other half would simply have no reason to play the game at all. They'd have two very good reasons to NOT play the game, though:
-In your perfect MMO, well over half the player base will gain nothing, will not be able to play content, not be able to build up their character.
-That same group will be constantly preyed on by the smaller, but much more dedicated, playerbase... Whenever you want to go somewhere, you'll be ganked.

All in all, I don't think you've thought about this thoroughly. Oh, you've analysed your personal qualms, and what you would like to see, but I don't think you've looked at it from the developer's point of view.

[LilSaihah]

We need a good WH40k MMO.

sounds like an oxymoron to me

@OP, I only think that you'd be able to use WoW's lore if you gave it a vigorous scrubbing. There're too many stains on it to really use it as is.

Also, a companion system, except improved so that tanks and DPS companions aren't completely useless. It's kind of implied by using SWTOR's crafting system.

[Darkis]

We need a good WH40k MMO.

Had to put some more salt on that wound, haven't you? =(